makerbot as microscope: what we learned

Joel Belouet has been wor­king on an art piece invol­ving micro­or­ga­nisms and nee­ded a sup­port struc­ture for his micros­cope camera. It turns out the Maker­Bot sit­ting on our table was the solution.

At first Joel atta­ched the camera to the z axis and the slide res­ted on the build plat­form, but it soon became clear that it would be much bet­ter to have the sam­ple remain still and the camera move ins­tead. Inver­ting the posi­ti­ons meant atta­ching the slide to the bot­tom of the z axis plat­form in order to pre­vent the camera lens from bum­ping against it. This setup also allowed him to use the z crank as a focus mechanism.

So we were happy with the phy­si­cal setup which, in con­junc­tion with ReplicatorG’s con­trol panel, pro­ved very use­ful for fin­ding and trac­king micro­or­ga­nisms within the sample.

But we also wan­ted to try an auto­ma­ted scan.

So the next step was to gene­rate a path for the camera. We made a bunch of expe­ri­ments with MakerBot’s Fros­tru­der Tool Sweet, but even­tu­ally an stl + skein­forge, with a fee­drate of 12 mm/m, tur­ned out to be the best solution.

Finally, the micros­cope camera (which is a cheap web­cam with a macro lens that Joel flip­ped upside down) was con­nec­ted to his Pro­ces­sing script that records both video and stills from the inco­ming video feed.

Video of fist auto­ma­ted scan (sam­ple is moss from a well).

Joel will con­ti­nue to work on this as part of his art pro­ject, but this setup seems to be use­ful for a few other things:
– Record micros­co­pic ima­ges of each and every area of a sam­ple: just feed the maker­bot a grid-like design, set the pro­ces­sing script to take a photo of each qua­drant, go enjoy the great out­do­ors, and when you return to the lab you’ll have all the ima­ges wai­ting for you on your hard drive.
– Auto­ma­ti­cally cap­ture ima­ges of live bac­te­ria: we’ll try to do this by having the pro­ces­sing script track cer­tain types of motion and cap­ture stills when it’s detec­ted.
– Some dan­cers here at the AZ resi­dency also became very inte­res­ted in using it as live video feed for performance.

Well, that’s it for now. We’re going to get more cof­fee and think of a way to make an action movie star­ring nema­to­des and tardigrades :)

Motivate U$!

We have an altlab sou­ve­nir :) This cool T-Shirt !

This is a t-shirt sel­ling cam­paign to help us raise money for our pro­jects. We appre­ci­ate the sup­port of anyone who is wil­ling to pur­chase one for just €10.4 Colors avai­la­ble: Black, Red, Blue and Dark Blue.

You can buy one at altLab’s events or in one of our Open Ses­si­ons, every Tuesday!